SK, the Mail is required reading for house price porn, interspersed with the occasional decent, well researched and interesting article.

B, TS, I think it is somewhere between your two interpretations. Don't forget, the Mail trolls its own readers. And it has little to do with the murder, they usually say what somebody's house is worth.

"I never read it as envy, so much that people they're signalling that these are middle class people rather than just some chav in Blackbird Leys."

It's not much better if they are implying that your life is somehow worth more if you live in a £640,000 house. Mind you, people do think that way: during a discussion about a road junction that had been the scene of a fatal accident, the County Surveyor remarked to my mother "what if someone important had been killed?"

Sometimes it looks like the Mail is blaming and shaming the crime victim for letting the house down by getting involved in something so common as crime. Getting murdered lowers the tone of the district really badly.

If someone tells me that a young man was killed in Toxteth, I know there's a decent chance that it's gang-related murder. And people (of all classes) don't really care about gang members being killed. We don't really view them as crime victims. Ok, technically they are, but they're people who live by the sword and die by the sword. If things had gone slightly differently, they'd have been the accused.

Someone living in a nice bit of Oxford is most likely someone who didn't deserve it. OK, you occasionally find out that they're a secret drug dealer, but that's rare. That said, the number of times that Crimewatch updates revealed something was fascinating. Some decent married man who was paying rent boys...

"Someone living in a nice bit of Oxford is most likely someone who didn't deserve it."

True, but even chavs from Blackbird Leys don't murder random people in nice parts of Oxford, unless it was the guy who stole his first edition getting his own back for him ruining the sale, but it seems unlikely.